


see you on the moon then

by gatsbyparty



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/F, F/M, M/M, Post-Sburb
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-01-03
Updated: 2013-07-05
Packaged: 2017-11-23 14:09:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 15,581
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/623035
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gatsbyparty/pseuds/gatsbyparty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A head pokes up, the only thing visible at this distance the thistledown black hair and gray skin. The horns are small and faintly bean shaped. John tightens his grip on the seawall.</p><p>“Right, so!” the alien announces, “What the fuck planet am I on?”</p><p>“Oh my fucking god,” Dave says. “He’s not even speaking English.”<br/>+</p><p>Everyone knows aliens aren't real.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. arc 1 act 1

**Author's Note:**

> IT LOOKED SO MUCH LONGER IN THE DOC

  
  
It’s a Monday morning, brilliantly sunny and warm enough that the wind doesn’t make pedestrians hunch into their windbreakers, and four teenagers stand at the very front of the crowd ringing the bay.  
  
“There’s no way it’s them,” John says, shading his eyes against the glare on the water. The waves are low at this time of year, but the tide is pulling out and it’s dragging on the edge of _the thing_ that had splashed down at sunrise. “Right? Statistically.”  
  
“Statistically unlikely, yes,” Rose agrees, but she’s hopeful, they all are, and they all know it. “The universe is a very large place, and what is one ship to a fleet? By all accounts they were much more populous.”  
  
“Yeah, but we don’t know what’s gone on the last few years. Could be there was, a plague or something, I don’t know.”  
  
“I think it is them,” Jade says firmly. “If only because the two of you make me want to jump headfirst onto the jetty when you talk like that. God!”  
  
“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean, Jade.”  
  
Jade looks back at Rose with her eyebrows pulled low. Rose smiles serenely.  
  
“Look, children, it lives,” Dave cuts in, angling the brim of his hat up. “I’m serious. Is that some kind of hatch? We are living in the future, hell fucking yes.”  
  
The crowd around them jostles noisily. The police have tried to set up cordons a few times, but there are people right up against the seawall, and when the Coast Guard tried to check things out, they hit some kind of barrier a few dozen feet out. The ship-which of course it is, it’s an actual spaceship, floating in the bay, like it’s nothing-is big and silver and there’s lettering on the side, like John remembers from the one or two times he ever saw Alternian writing. The shapes are unmistakable and weirdly like something he saw in a video game once.  
  
A hatch is indeed slowly rising from the upper left half, a smooth curve that slides back into the metal. John hears what might be policemen preparing their guns. Shouting. Frenzied hollering from a toddler somewhere in the back of the crowd. The wind kicks up, topping the waves with foam. A head pokes up, the only thing visible at this distance the thistledown black hair and gray skin. The horns are small and faintly bean shaped. John tightens his grip on the seawall.  
  
“Right, so!” the alien announces, “What the fuck planet am I on?”  
  
“Oh my fucking god,” Dave says. “He’s not even speaking English.”  
  
The crowd begins to jostle. John throws elbows until he can hoick himself up onto the concrete. He cups his hands around his mouth.  
  
“Karkat! Is that you?”  
  
“Who the hell wants to-John? Is the universe here to fuck up my day? Was crashing my fucking ship not enough?”  
  
“Son, get down from there, it’s agitated-”  
  
John does a little hot-foot jig, kicking away the officer’s hands until Jade starts running interference.  
  
“Yeah, it’s all of us!”  
  
“Oh, fuck me, what are the odds that we would all end up on the same wretched planet? Why are the idiots behind you drawing weapons?”  
  
“They think you’re an alien.”  
  
“I am, dumbfuck.”  
  
“Oh, right. You should probably come ashore.”  
  
“Right.”  
  
Karkat vanishes back into the ship. John turns all the way around, speaking as quickly as he can.  
  
“No, not a threat, c’mon, promise, put your goddamn guns down oh my god.”  
  
“Kid,” one of the oval shaped policemen says warningly, shoving forward and reaching up like he’s going to pull John down. Without changing expression, Dave slams his heel down into the officer’s shin and stands directly in his path. John doesn’t want to use the windy thing, because he can count the number of people who remember the game on one hand, but the Alternian ship is whining and sparking and it’s not taking off.  
  
It’s not such a difficult thing to lift. It’s making the ship look like it’s flying under its own power that’s difficult. He makes it pitch and yaw a little on the way up but holds it steady on the way forward and sets it down so easily on the jetty that it doesn’t even scrape. Well. Mostly doesn’t scrape. It’s not like anyone’s going to notice a few more sparks.    
  
  
Karkat comes out of the hatch headfirst, doing some kind of grapple-and-flip to land on his feet, with a look on his face that says he knows exactly what John did and he’s extremely agitated about it. John’s hands are sweaty on the styrofoam of his cup. Behind Karkat are two other trolls, lighter on their feet, one with brilliantly green eyes and the other’s a kind of murky purple-gray.  It takes John a couple of seconds of awkwardly obvious staring, but he identifies them as Kanaya and Eridan.  
  
Jade starts working her space thing or something, because the ship vanishes entirely and the trolls flicker like heat shimmer until they look like a trio of weirdly gangly ginger teenagers. The cops start to mutter about taking them in for disturbing the peace, but the crowd seems more vaguely confused than angry.  
  
“We’re performance artists,” John says with blithe cheerfulness, “From uptown! With Professor Zahara? Didn’t you get his emails?”  
  
Already frazzled and startled, John can only lie for so long, but Rose is always ready to step in and talk people in circles.  
  
“Officers,” she says pleasantly. Her voice has lowered in the last few years, and it makes her very appealing to listen to. “We’re rather in your debt for your contribution to our performance. We’ll get a much more impressive grade from the involvement of judicial forces. I hope we haven’t been such a bother as to require arrest?”  
  
“What kind of assignment is this exactly?”  
  
“We were to observe the reactions of passerby to possible extraterrestrials.”  
  
“Your professor sounds like a strange man.”  
  
“He’s quite strange, sir. He published a novel on the zoological dubious this past fall. I am continually awed and amused by him.”  
  
The officer is beginning to look a little dubious himself.  
  
“Your friend here assaulted an officer,” the cop Dave stomped on says. He’s got a very tight grip on Dave’s shoulder.  
  
“My friend has an unfortunate lack of restraint with his temper. He’s actually ten minutes late for a meeting with his probation officer.”  
  
“Yeah, and who’s that?”  
  
Before things can go from bad to worse, a third officer shoulders his way forward and pries the first man’s hand off Dave’s shoulder.  
  
“Christ, c’mon, Wheeler, we got a robbery in progress two streets down and they’re a bunch of goddamn kids.”  
  
“Alright, alright.”  
  
Dave rubs his shoulder absently when Officer Wheeler lets go. They get off with a warning and the burning shame of being unable to shake a policeman.  Jade looks like she’s about to pass out-no game to power god tier means it’s body powered and breakfast was hours ago-but she at least gets to the apartment before she throws up. The ship ends up at the bottom of the bay.  
  
John puts up pasta on the stove, because he’s of the opinion there’s nothing better when you’re falling headfirst into autocannibalism. Jade drops the screen on the trolls.  
  
“Wow, I guess molecular disruption can really take it out of you,” John says, watching Jade tear into her third bowl of spaghetti. He was fine after just the one bowl.  
  
“It’s so complicated,” Jade says through a mouthful of noodles. A few spill down her chin, showing long canines. “There were a lot of nucleotides that had to be changed. Sorry you were all ginger! I hope none of that was permanent. Oops.”  
  
The trolls are all on the couch, taking up the entire thing in a sprawl of bony, gangly limbs. Karkat looks distinctly queasy, and Eridan is clicking low in his throat at Kanaya’s spaghetti.  
  
“I don’t even know what that means,” Karkat snaps. If John listens carefully, he can hear little raspy noises in Karkat’s voice. It’s the cutest thing he’s ever heard.  
  
“It’s a hair color,” Rose says from the back of the couch, where Kanaya is allowing Rose to inspect her horns. “Recessive gene. Do you all have such dark hair?”  
  
“Yeah,” Eridan says into Kanaya’s bowl. His fins wobble. “What’s this shit called?”  
  
“It’s spaghetti.”  
  
“Looks like the tail a somethin’ you’d find in a sewer.”  
  
“Gross!”  
  
“Hate to break up the asshole party,” Dave says, slouching down into his chair, “but aren’t there supposed to be a shit ton more of you?”  
  
“We’re here on vacation, obviously,” Karkat barks, shoving his hands into his hair. “Fuck, I need a haircut. No, Strider’s unfortunately right, but we’re hunting them down.”  
  
“Fef took off like a sweep and a half ago,” Eridan says, sliding over to put his head on Karkat’s lap, which is a little weird. “Took us near on a perigee to track her ship’s signal. Wasn’t even a proper warship or anythin’, just a little lowblood’s shitheap. Fuckin’ shameful. Came right through here. Hey, if humans don’t have orbital weapons platforms, how in the fuck did we get shot down? Have you even fuckin’ reached upper atmosphere or are you all groundpounders forever?”  
  
“What’s an orbital station?” John wants to know, before Rose corrects him and points out to Eridan that humans have, in fact, achieved orbit and left things there. There’s Tiangong and the International Space Station, but John’s relatively sure the ISS doesn’t have low orbit canons.  
  
“How your species hasn’t been wiped out by marauding space worm spores is something I will never fucking understand,” Karkat says.  
  
“Cos we wiped them out a century ago,” Eridan says peaceably, pulling the afghan off of Rose and draping it over his chest.  
  
“You’ve gotten grub sauce on it,” Kanaya points out. John thinks it might be the first time he’s ever heard her talk. She’s as pleasant-sounding as Rose. He thinks maybe they should record audio books.  
  
“We don’t need space weapons because there’s no such thing as aliens,” Jade says, coming back in with another bowl of spaghetti and the end of a multivitamin poking out of her mouth. She’s got bright eyes again. The multivitamin vanishes with the next bite of spaghetti. “What’s grubsauce?”  
  
“Grubs are like babies,” John says. “Humans don’t cook with babies. Mostly, anyway.”  
  
Karkat looks like he’s about to launch into that, but Rose interrupts as smoothly as John’s ever seen someone interrupt.  
  
“Obviously the three of you will have to stay with us, at least for tonight.” Rose unfolds her legs, resting her calf against Kanaya’s bicep. “Judging from our earlier fiasco, it’s in everyone’s best interest.”  
  
Karkat makes a noise like it’s a personal concession. John wants to protest that it’s hardly even noon, but then he remembers the trolls are nocturnal or something like that, so it’s probably like midnight for them. He wonders if trolls have circadian rhythms. The apartment isn’t really big enough for seven full grown people (or four) and Jade is really into sleepovers lately, so the mattresses end up on the living room floor covered with every blanket that could be hunted down. Eridan’s three inches taller than even Dave, but Karkat’s barely Rose’s height, so pajamas end up being a bit of a production. Jade refuses to let anyone sleep in their jeans.  
  
Eridan is propped up against the couch, staring glazed-eyed at his bare shins. He really doesn’t seem to like basketball shorts all that much, but the trolls are all punchy tired with space lag or something, and he isn’t complaining where anyone can hear him. Kanaya fits into John’s ghost slime pants better than he does, and Karkat is rather hilarious glowering in a night gown. John only notices any of this because Kanaya’s not wearing a shirt and apparently girl trolls don’t really have boobs. Or nipples. Trolls are weird.  
  
Fruit salad should have been an easy sell for lunch, but John’s treated to the sight of Karkat piking a piece of mango on his claws and examining it suspiciously.  
  
“What the fuck is this,” he wants to know.  
  
“It’s a fruit, asshole, it’s fine.”  
  
“What’s _fruit._ ”  
  
“It’s sucrose. Just eat it, would you?”  
  
They can get away with skipping class for a day or two, and John steadfastly does not think about the aliens in his apartment, but eventually responsibilities start to pile up, and John is already risking an incomplete in his history. It’s just so dry, and his professor is so out of touch.  
  
Kanaya very cheerfully occupies herself with all of the human literature Rose has, but Karkat and Eridan demand internet access. John’s worried that can only end in weird porn.  
  
He comes home from History of Western Civilizations on Thursday, though, and Rose and the trolls are huddled around Rose’s laptop, obediently repeating the dulcet sounds of an English as a Second Language course.  
  
“Well, they obviously can’t come to school with us,” Rose says at John’s choked expression. “And if they ever wish to have a future on Earth, they need to know at least one human language. Why shouldn’t it be the one we speak?”  
  
The problem with the trolls is that they understand English just fine, but the sounds of English and Alternian are evidently very different, and they start running headfirst into grammar roadblocks almost immediately.  
  
“Aliens,” Jade points out. “Completely different culture and history and all. It’s only what you could expect!”  
  
“We did make you,” Eridan says. “You’d think there’d be some kinda overlap, culturally speakin’.”  
  
“What is a fucking noun?” Karkat demands, looking positively acidic. “What is a verb? What is your culture’s preoccupation with all of this stupid fucking horseshit?”  
  
“Nouns are really easy,” John says, thinking fondly of first grade. “Person, place, or thing. Do you guys really not have a word for that?”  
  
“Obviously it wouldn’t be in English, fucktard!” Karkat spits. John’s a little worried that lingual frustration is going to give Karkat a cardiac event. Karkat says something John doesn’t understand, which brings this from bizarre to really fucking bizarre. It turns out that grammatical terms don’t really have cognates.  
  
“I imagine that we still have similar sentence structures, but the words you’re using are so strange that the translator microbes aren’t working for us,” Rose says, utterly straight-faced. “The babel fish in my ear is having a fit over your voiced palatal fricatives.”  
  
“ _Ear fish_?” Eridan repeats in feigned delight. “You’re all so fuckin’ strange! What’s an ear? What’s a fish? How come you got ear fish translators but you don’t have fuckin’ orbital defenses like any self respectin’ sapient species?”  
  
“Auricular sponge clots are the same thing, I think,” Jade says. She’s been picking up analogues faster than anyone. “Like ears! But gross. Fish is a food. Sometimes a pet. People keep them in their, uh, grass...rings?”  
  
“Lawn rings.” Kanaya corrects. She still hasn’t moved from her intent stare at the screen, which is now on a children’s alphabet website. She mouths ‘a is for apple’ very slowly. “What is an apple?”  
  
“It was in lunch the other day, when you guys showed up,” Jade says. “Speaking of that, is anyone going to discuss what we’re gonna do with the aliens in our apartment?”  
  
“I was thinking give us photograph identification and loose us on a reign of terror,” Kanaya says idly, without turning. Now she’s onto ‘c is for cat’. “What is this beast? What do you call them?”  
  
“That’s a cat, Kanaya.”  
  
“Meowbeast,” Karkat says flatly. John can’t tell if he’s trying to make connections easier for Kanaya or if he’s just being an antagonistic little shit.  
  
“What is a dog?”  
  
“Oh, is she getting to d?” Jade says, then pauses. “Wow, I could’ve made such a dick joke there.”  
  
“What is a dick?”  
  
“Bulge,” Rose says with that weird serenity to her words that means she isn’t really paying attention to what she’s saying. “That is the cognate, I believe. Penis.”  
  
“What is a penis?”  
  
“We’re not fucking talking about human junk!” Karkat says. “Tell me more about the d! I cannot sit through another moment of this stupid fucking circle jerk of misinformation.”  
  
John tries steadfastly not to snicker, but it’s a lost cause.  
  
“Karkat, you’re really not grasping the not-sounding-like-an-alien thing,” John says, when Karkat’s glare is starting to look like it hurts.  
  
“What a fucking surprise that remains!” Karkat spits. “Who would ever have expected the aliens to sound like aliens? Humans are all fucking racist.”  
  
“Karkat, would you calm down a little?” Jade says, sounding a little irritated. It’s not a suggestion.  
  
Kanaya kind of bundles Karkat down in her lap, finally turning away from the alphabet, and then she sort of strangles him with her scarf and blindfolds him or something? It’s all really weird and it doesn’t get any less weird when she reaches down and pulls the afghan off the floor and drapes it over both of them. Karkat’s stopped growling, at least.  
  
“Um,” John says. “Alright.”  
  
Under the afghan Karkat fidgets around until he’s shivering against Kanaya’s chest with his head pressed to her neck. It shouldn’t be a surprise that it still feels like he’s cheating on Gamzee, but what else can he expect from himself? Why shouldn’t he be just as shit at regulating his feelings as he is at everything else?  
  
“You okay over there?” John asks, too weirded out to be a douche. “Is that. Like is that normal behavior for you?”  
  
“Your hospitality has been very welcome,” Kanaya says soothingly, “It remains appreciated. However, it would be a mistake to think that four days of rest could outweigh a sweep on the run. Even an up-down orientation is a struggle right now.”  
  
“Sorry you’re still space sick, Karkat,” John says, “Wait, an up-down orientation?”  
  
“The points of reference in space are quite different.”  
  
“I guess, yeah,” John says, mildly uncomfortable with the thought. He can’t imagine orienting himself without the ground below. Even flying, there’s gravity to tell you what’s up and what’s down. Space doesn’t have any of that. Space doesn’t have any of the little safety rails that earthbound living does: oxygen, gravity, weather, water cycles, other people. It’s just empty, until you hit other planets that are probably just as empty.  
  
Karkat dozes off eventually, slumping off Kanaya’s side and hanging partway off the arm of the computer chair. Kanaya pulls the afghan off her head, tucks it around Karkat, and turns back to Rose’s laptop.  
  
“Now what is this ‘e’?” she asks, clicking over to the next tab. “And who is Hitler? I have ended up on his informational entry multiple times from unrelated sources.”  
  
That sets off a three hour long discussion of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, which leads into watching documentaries on the History Channel and Netflix. Kanaya has the alphabet down entirely before dusk, and she spends all of dinner curled up with Rose, bowl of cereal in one hand and keyboard in the other.  
  
“North American students will typically have a vocabulary of almost 80,000 words when entering university,” Kanaya reads slowly, but it’s all disjointed sounds instead of words, and her growing frustration is obvious. Rose pulls up another page.  
  
“A ram. Cows feeding. Ahead. All.”  
  
“You won’t learn it in a single day.”  
  
“Rome wasn’t built in a day,” Jade contributes through a mouthful of Lucky Charms. “Wait, do aliens have Rome? Really old empires that keep influencing modern life?”  
  
“Not really,” Eridan says. “We kinda been the _only_ empire for near on as long as we’ve been an empire.”  
  
“That’s so lonely.”  
  
“Yeah, well, if you want to try and have diplomatic fuckin’ meetin’s with the slaughtering rat people from the next system over, be my guest. Me, I’m doin’ it with a big fuckin’ gun in my hand, but maybe that’s just cos you ain’t ever even invaded or anythin’.”  
  
“Hey, don’t be racist!”  
  
“Look,” Eridan says, putting his bowl down and planting his elbows on his knees. The stern look on his face is completely ruined, between the limp curls of his hair and the primary colored marshmallow stuck to his nose. “Your grubs got nothin’ expected a them. You’re all coddled, near as anyone would put it. For us, you want a chance, you get your spindly fuckin’ paws on a weapon soon’s you can and put it to use. You don’t even have strife specibi-exceptin’ the four a you, a’course.”  
  
“Wars only happen on tv,” Dave says, with a grimly piquant tilt to his mouth that makes him look scarily like Rose. “That’s what he’s saying, alright, their daily reality is kids’ stuff for us, only not in a way that counts, do you get it? Little toy soldiers all dressed up in fatigues and beta fish fins, aren’t you? You move like you’re about to go crossways homicidal and murder everyone in the vicinity. We move like suburban kids that got up at five fucking am and made too many pancakes.”  
  
“Dave, you sound kind of weird,” Jade says.  
  
Dave clamps his mouth shut and slumps back in his chair. He’s not looking so well.  
  
“Strider’s got it,” Eridan says. “You’re a bunch a kids.”  
  
  
  
  
 **  
**


	2. arc 1 act 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ok i am not remotely confident in any of this characterization but hey i play fast and loose

“Shit, shit, shit, Dave, I need you to pick up the phone, _there is a body in the shower, pick UP YOUR PHONE_!”  
  
The voicemail is recorded at 1:34 pm. Dave doesn’t see it until he goes on break at 3:32. His face goes progressively paler and stiffer, until he looks like a porcelain mask by the time John starts screaming. .   
  
“I need to go home,” Dave says to his manager at 3:35. “I need to go home right this fucking minute, nothing personal, I’ll make up the time next shift, but there’s a crisis of insane proportions going on at home.”  
  
He’s pretty sure it’s the uncanny valley look of his face that really sells it. He gets to the apartment in record time, still sending John texts as he walks in the door at 4:09. Karkat and Jade are in the hallway on either side of the door and while Dave doesn’t do a double take at the way Karkat looks, the brief flash is utterly hilarious and a little frightening. He’s wearing foundation, sunglasses, and a fluffy winter hat. He looks like a serial killer with a skin problem.  
  
Rose is standing in the doorway to the bathroom, with that look of weary efficiency that makes Dave want to rattle her until her teeth shake and bundle her up in blankets at the same time. He can see over her head pretty easily-he’s got almost a foot on her-and on the bathroom floor is John, crouching over an orange hook of keratin. The point is sharp enough that with a violent enough toss, it could rip John’s dick clean off and still have room for dessert.  
  
“What’s going on?” Dave demands, leaning to the side to see past the shower curtain. “There’s a body in the shower? What is this, the Twilight Zone?”  
  
“It’s not a body, as it turns out,” Rose corrects him, tilting her head up without surprise. “He’s quite alive.”

"Sorry if I scared you or whatever," John says without looking up or moving.

“He?” Dave repeats. The hook on the floor moves, scraping over the tile. John darts upward just in time to avoid having his leg cut open and then Tavros Nitram lurches sideways into view, spilling out of the shower and losing his balance badly enough to score a long gouge in the opposite wall.  
  
“Uh, sorry,” he says. “My gyroscopes are kind of, um, wonky right now. I didn’t really mean to get up yet, or possibly ever, in full disclosure. Wow, this is not fun, I’m so dizzy.”  
  
“Dude,” Dave says. “Dude. I was told there was a body in the shower and I was expecting an actual body. I can’t pickle that. He’s not going to fit in the fridge, look at that rack. Sup, Tav, you want a glass of water or something or can you just rip open the water pipes with those horns?”  
  
“I didn’t actually mean to end up in your ablution trap, I just woke up and it was raining-”  
  
“It’s called a shower,” Rose says patiently. “He doesn’t remember how he got here. Regardless, our lives seem to have gotten a little harder.”  
  
“Wait, the shower was on?”  
  
John purses his lips and gives Dave a sideways look.  
  
“Yeah, it was on. I was in the fucking shower and he just showed up on the floor.”  
  
“Okay,” Dave says, pressing the palms of his hands to his forehead then sliding his shades into his hair. “Can we just all sit in the living room or something and plan our lives out in detail so the universe doesn’t feel obliged to fill up our free time?”  
  
Karkat and Jade are hassled back inside. Eridan is enticed out of the cupboards with a package of Twizzlers that he proceeds to puree with his shark teeth. Between Rose, Kanaya, Dave, and John, they manage to direct Tavros out of the bathroom with minimal collateral damage. Dry clothes are fetched, although the end result is he’s wearing a “This Is What A Black Feminist Looks Like” shirt and basketball shorts. The chrome of his shins is practically blinding in the sunlight, and his legs below the shorts are skinny and long enough that a ballerina would weep of jealousy.  
  
Karkat bares his teeth at Eridan, which gets him a Twizzler, and then it turns into a whole thing and no one is satisfied until Kanaya snatches the bag and shuts them up with the most elegant, beautiful snarl Dave has ever heard. He could make remixes of that snarl.   
  
“Did you even fucking tell anyone you were leaving?” Karkat demands, aghast.  
  
“We didn’t,” Eridan points out.  
  
“Well, no-” Tavros pauses to cough, a long rattling bark kind of sound, although not wet like pneumonia. Maybe he’s got space pneumonia. “You were all already kind of, um, gone.”  
  
“You don’t need to make it sound like we all abandoned you, Nitram, you seemed pretty happy shipside.”  
  
“I was very happy shipside,” Tavros says, but he sounds unbelievably plaintive. “Only, well, I guess there wasn’t really much for me to do, and not really anyone to talk to, so I guess in a manner of speaking I was not all that happy. But that’s not this, uh, particular manner of speaking, as this is the one I am using and that is not the meaning I intend to convey.”  
  
John’s got a look on his face like he’s swallowing screws. Dave makes a mental note to ask him about that later.   
  
“Do you want a sandwich or something?” Jade interrupts in frustration. “Because I’m going to make myself one and I’m not going to sit here and listen to you argue about who was happy or not because then you’ll all complain later when I’m trying to eat.”  
  
“What’s a sandwich?” Tavros asks blankly.  
  
“It’s bread and you put stuff in it,” John says. “Do trolls seriously not have sandwiches? It’s like, elementary. Sandwiches are the atoms of the kitchen.”  
  
“I don’t really understand what you’re saying,” Tavros says gamely, “and I don’t know what a kitchen is, but I guess I will have one of these human sandwiches, if they’re so basic.”  
  
“You’re pretty basic,” John snaps.  
  
“Was that some kind of, uh, burn or something? Some ineffective Earth human insult?”  
  
John throws his hands up and storms into the kitchen. Dave’s surprised and a little impressed. John hasn’t been this much of a little bitch since high school. Jade rolls her eyes with a loud huffy sigh, checks to make sure John heard it, and goes to make sandwiches.   
  
“Do you want jelly?” she calls.  
  
“I don’t know what kind of jelly humans use!”  
  
“Fruit!”  
  
“What’s a fruit?”  Tavros demands. Dave pictures the future, using his carefully honed cause-and-effect-timeline abilities: he sees months on months, acquiring trolls like Pokemon, and having to explain fruit to every single one of them. It’s just an endless loop of fruitsplaining, a Dantean circlejerk of alien ignorance.  
  
“Fucking rad,” he says. It gets him a look or two, but his roommates are pretty much used to him mumbling to himself, and the trolls are pretty entirely engrossed in the Twizzlers again. They’re like really militant children: they’re playing now, only Eridan snaps his jaw shut less than an inch from Karkat’s arm and Karkat laughs. Dave goes a fraction paler. Fish trolls are packing some serious dental heat.  
  
Jade comes back, halfway into her own sandwich, and very carefully hands Tavros a ham sandwich.  
  
“I didn’t know if you’d be lactose intolerant,” she says like she’s explaining something, but the look she gets at the word ‘lactose’ effectively shoots that horse in the head.   
  
“It’s an enzyme you use for milk,” Jade informs them. “Okay, it doesn’t produce milk, it’s just a disaccharide sugar in cow’s milk or whatever. Sometimes people can’t break the sugar down! There’s nothing wrong with that. Their lives just suck.”  
  
Tavros just gives her a slightly more confused look with every word, but after a tentative bite of the sandwich he just abouts crams it down his throat. Dave’s eyebrows and the corner of his mouth go up fractionally. Anything more would just call unnecessary attention to his face. Rose’s slantways smirk says she saw it anyway and that she’s probably planning to grill him about it later. Dave rolls one shoulder like he’s stretching, but Rose will know he’s already working on diversionary tactics. It’s not like he plans it ahead of time, but between leftover godtier shit and a sense of his sister, he’s no doubt it will happen. It’s easier to distract and divert if you’re calm; it’s something Dave knows to the bone.   
  
“Gotta be a zen pool, reflect the horseshit back,” he mumbles.  
  
“What was that, Dave?”  
  
“Wondering when we’re going to accept that aliens aren’t pets,” Dave says, cracking his shoulder. “I mean, sure, ya’ll in the hizzouse, it’s gonna be a good goddamn time. Can we get to the important shit here? We’ve got aliens in our apartment. My boy Tav showed up in the shower like he was brought by the fairies. Everything just keeps on happening so much and we’re just going to keep reacting until there’s no substrate to phosphorylate.”  
  
Rose leans forward, balances her elbows on her knees so she’s mirroring Dave’s posture. She’s got a quirk to her mouth all understanding. Dave is head-to-heel in Rose’s understanding. Got to get her fingers into things, got to pry the lid off to see what crawls out.   
  
“My, Dave,” she says. John’s all fond of Rose’s voice the way it is, and Dave loves his sister, but he wants to shake her until that self-satisfied probing note is rattled loose. “Am I sensing some frustration with our current circumstances?”  
  
“You’re sure as goddamn sensing something there.”  
  
“There is an enjoyable routine to complacency,” Rose says, narrowing her eyes, then sitting back and resuming her tranquil expression. “Despite the possibilities of devil’s advocate, I must say I agree. Kanaya? Karkat? Eridan? If you could pry your teeth free of each other’s skeletal structures?”  
  
Dave knows there’s a lot of human nonverbal communication: rhythm, intonation, stress, rate, pitch, volume, eye contact, gestures, all the way down to paralinguals like sighing. Human nonverbal has nothing on troll nonverbal. It’s almost all audio, for start. They don’t move half as much, no fidgets or shifts, but there’s a lot more snarling and sharp-pitched chirps than Dave would expect from a person. It’s not disconcerting enough to throw him off, but it prevents them from fading into the background when he’s talking. It pulls up unconscious behaviors, makes him watch their mouths and expressions for cues that he isn’t going to get.  
  
“I would not want to put myself in the unenviable position of making decisions for you without input, lest it end up permanent.” Rose lines up the ends of her fingers, touches them to her chin. “Not only would it be rude in the extreme, as you’re all _quite_ cognitively capable, it would be unnecessary. What _are_ we going to do with all of you?”  
  
“What’re the cons a comin’ out?”  
  
John snickers. Eridan side-eyes him.  
  
“Vivisection,” Rose says flatly. “Panic. You’re not citizens, you have no rights. We could not protect you from a single thing the government would want you for-theoretically. You may find Earth eminently unsuitable and yet be unable to leave. And, of course, any number of things that I can’t predict.”  
  
“And the pros?”  
  
“Freedom of movement. Rapid change. Experiencing an alien culture.”  
  
“I recommend waiting,” Kanaya says with a pensive look on her face that’s only marginally ruined by the three Twizzlers poking out the corner of her mouth. They wobble when she talks. “We lack adequate information to make such a decision.”  
  
“How do you gather information when you’re stuck in a room?” Karkat demands, although he doesn’t seem overly eager to get outside himself. “Show me more of your stupid human internets. Is it so slow because you’ve had it for about as long as it fucking takes me to inhale? I didn’t create you because I thought it would be fun to see how slow a species based on Karkat Vantas would develop. Humans, you are an utter disappointment to your gods.”  
  
“If you’re going to mock human internet you can set up your own goddamn wifi.”  
  
John can tolerate a pretty sizeable amount of Karkat’s invective, especially when he dazes out and doesn’t actually listen, but eventually it’s easier to set up Karkat on omegle than it is to pretend to listen to him. John figures Karkat can’t get into too much trouble on a website where he’s only identified as ‘stranger’, especially since, well, he is. It’s definitely easier than spackling him in makeup and stuffing him into winter clothing. Kanaya watches curiously over Karkat’s shoulder, occasionally jumping for the keyboard when he takes too long to answer.   
  
“What the fuck does A-S-L mean?”   
  
“Age, sex, location.”

  
“I’m not having sex on the internet.”  
  
“Wow, intentional miscommunications sure are funny, Karkat.”  
  
“Why’d they click out so fast?”  
  
“What did you say?”  
  
“My age, grubfondler. I am a human internet genie! Ask and you shall fucking recieve.”  
  
“Did you use troll years?”  
  
“Obviously.”  
  
“And how many is that?”  
  
“Eight and a half.”  
  
“Okay, yeah, that’s a crime. Maybe we should put you on neopets or something.”  
  
“No, fuck that, troll neopets is better and you’re not tarnishing that. No! Give me the damn keyboard!”  
  
“Karkat, they have been saying ‘u there’ for almost five minutes now, they will leave if they become impatient.”  
  
“What’s a _minute_?”  
  
John ticks off sixty seconds on Karkat’s knee.  
  
“That’s a minute.”  
  
“Stupid.”  
  
Dinner is a production, since everything needs to be re-explained to Tavros. Dave hasn’t had a lot of experience in being unintentionally condescending, but there’s been a lot of it the past week and a half. The trolls know what most things are, but not what they’re called, and Karkat keeps holding his fork like he’s going to pin someone’s hand with it and it’s starting to stress Dave out a little. He’s used to observing actions and knowing the reactions, but it’s a little too much amateur anthropology hour lately. He doesn’t want to watch the trolls like he does. They’re just so goddamn weird.   
  
Tavros keeps coughing the entire night like Orphan goddamn Annie. He’s a skinny little fuck of a dude; his eyes are brown full through the same way Karkat’s are dark red through. He’s taller than Karkat, but shorter than Kanaya and Eridan. Dave wonders if it’s because his spindly metal legs are too short for his torso. It makes him look unbalanced as all hell.   
  
Sleeping arrangements have been changing every night, and probably will keep changing until someone finds a way to fit eight teenagers into an apartment meant for a single person. Eridan, who must be topping six foot three in his socks, barely manages to hunch himself on the foldout couch, but Karkat fits compactly under Eridan’s armpit and Kanaya folds neatly into the narrow space between couch and wall. Rose is extremely cheerful to share that exact narrow space. The mattresses are still in the living room, since no one wants to sleep on the bare floor, and Dave and John and Jade Tetris themselves in with enough space left for Tavros to lie stick straight on the edge and hoick his rack up onto the arm of the couch.   
  
“This is a fucking disgrace,” Dave says when it’s three am and the trolls have yet to to stop muttering and shifting. “I get that you’re all eye-eyes or whatever but if you keep fucking with my diurnal cycle like this I’m going to go all Steve Irwin and wrestle you into the crocodile pit with my bare hands. I won’t even wear gloves, I’ll just MIB my fingerprints off after.”  
  
“What?”  
  
“Stop fucking muttering about chicken broth, Vantas, and we’ll be just fine.”  
  
“Sorry it tastes exactly like I imagine human piss bladders do.”  
  
“It’s just a bladder.”  
  
“Not if you use it for floating it’s not.”  
  
“That would be a fucking _swim bladder_ , Vantas.”  
  
“Whatever!”  
  
“Maybe you shouldn’t have drank it straight,” Jade hisses from somewhere towards the bathroom. “Maybe you shouldn’t have drank the listerine either! Maybe next time you touch a liquid I’m pouring it up your nose.”  
  
“You can’t make liquid go against gravity, this isn’t Troll Myst.”  
  
“Witch of space,” Jade says flatly. “I bet if I try hard enough I’ll find gravity’s mass and fuck with it just to pour liquids up your nose, Karkat.”  
  
“Can we all just go to sleep!”  
  
Next morning comes and no one’s slept. Troll bloodshot eyes are a strange experience. Dave hasn’t quite outgrown the whole teenager-that-just-woke-up thing, so when he wanders blearily into the kitchen it takes him a minute to process what’s going on.  
  
John and Tavros are on opposite sides of the table; John’s got his hands planted on the table itself, jaw locked. Tavros is clearly mocking John’s posture from the exaggerated tilt of his head, the low angry rattle in his throat making the hair on Dave’s neck stand up. He’s never heard any of the trolls make a noise like that. It’s somewhere between murderous rage and furious cat. He looks like he’s about to lunge over the table and go for John’s throat.   
  
Between them is the remains of the Twizzlers and a jar of jam.  
  
“You’re so unbelievably shitty,” Tavros says, with a weird flanging in his voice from the rattle. “Why would you ever even put Twizzlers in jam, that is so disgusting and you are disgusting.”  
  
“You’re an awful troll, I’m not even insulted.”  
  
“I was not aware I crossed into the fucking Twilight Zone,” Dave says, rubbing hard at his forehead. “The sign wasn’t properly labeled or something and now the sun is vanishing and here’s me without my headlight, wandering the desert. Oh, shit, now we’re falling down dunes, I could’ve warned you about that one.”  
  
“Dave.”  
  
“I’m so goddamn hungry and you’re arguing about candy, alright, it’s ridiculous.”  
  
Dave shuffle-lurches his way to the fridge, stares into it for a few minutes before pulling out a jar of pickles, and struggles briefly with the top of the jar.  
  
“At the end of the day, goddamnit, I’m killin’ this shit.” He whacks the rim of the jar against the counter, then pries off the lid. He fishes out a pickle, crunches it between his teeth.  
  
“Do you have any human Earth cough medicines?” Tavros wants to know, clearly ignoring Dave’s dull expression and pickle eating.   
  
“Dunno if they’re good.”  
  
“We could chop off his horns and take him to a doctor,” John says viciously. “Say he has a weird skin disease.”  
  
“My rack is all I have going for me!”  
  
“I’ll give you that one.”  
  
“I’ll give you my fist.”  
  
“Oh, christ,” Dave says, wandering back out of the kitchen with the pickles. He doesn’t have the patience for this. He settles on the couch, fishing the afghan from under the cushions. There are a couple of long purple hairs tangled in the weave.  
  
“Ampora,” Dave says. Eridan looks up from his game of checkers with Jade.  
  
“Yeah?”  
  
“These yours?”  
  
“Yeah.”  
  
Dave groans and rolls into the afghan. Eridan looks back down at his checkers. He’s getting roundly beat. Jade rainbow hops her king across the board and Eridan scuffles all of the pieces across the board.   
  
“I don’t want to play,” he announces. “Weaksauce grub shit, you couldn’t even hold a rifle.”  
  
“Yeah, I could,” Jade says, sounding a little perturbed. “But checkers is kind of a kid game.”  
  
“Show me a grocery store,” he says, completely mangling the English. “Show me your human groceries. And also maybe on a personal note a interest show me your human naval histories.”  
  
“Okay, those you can find online, but I’m not taking you to a grocery store, those are outside and your English is shit. Also: fins!”  
  
Eridan pats one of his fins, looking wounded.  
  
“Do really none a you have fins?”  
  
“Maybe mutant babies do, but not really.”  
  
Eridan breathes out through his thoracic gills, ruffling his shirt.   
  
“Hey, Kar,” he says, abandoning the checker board. Karkat pokes up from Dave’s far side, with a piece of dry spaghetti in his fist.  
  
“Yeah, you ungodly mess?”  
  
“You ever think maybe we won’t find anyone?”  
  
Karkat looks a little suspicious, like maybe all of the humans within hearing distance are going to care what they’re talking about.  
  
“If you think like that we might as well get back in the ship and go home.”  
  
“You know well as I do we can’t,” Eridan says, leaning back on his elbows. Jade turns her head to listen, lifting her eyebrows.  
  
“Why not?”  
  
“Well, you see,” Eridan says with an extremely faint undertone of sarcastic amusement, “on account of the entire Fleet was wiped out as we was hightailing it out of Alternian space, there’s no empire to track us or no pain in the ass fuckin’ encryption to break on anything. Cos it’s not there.”


	3. arc 1 act 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> probably still got some pacing issues here but shit i am so done

“Okay, scarf?”  
  
“Check.”  
  
“Hat?”  
  
“Check.”  
  
“Makeup?”  
  
“Fucking check.”  
  
“Sunglasses?”  
  
“This may come as a surprise,” Karkat says, voice dry but not yet irritated, “but the answer remains ‘check’, douchebag. We went through the whole list already.”  
  
Karkat doesn’t really look like a normal person: his eyelashes are too long, the seven layers of Rose’s vaguely skin colored powdery shit makes him look splotchy and possibly psoriatic, and between the thick wool hat (completely temperature inappropriate) and sunglasses he looks like either a homeless man or delusional, but it’s a sufficient disguise for what should be a low-key trip.  
  
“Gloves?”  
  
“Yeah, let’s go before I have heat stroke or something.”  
  
John’s not really sure how he got stuck with Take Karkat To The Supermarket Duty, but they get outside and down the stairs eventually. Karkat is utterly disturbed by the subway, watches the other people on the train suspiciously, and doesn’t stop hunching until they’re under the fluorescents.   
  
“What the hell is this?” Karkat wants to know every five minutes, from toothpaste brands to cheezits to mangoes, no matter how many times John tells him to shut up, because he really obviously isn’t speaking English, and Alternian doesn’t even sound like a human language at all.   
  
Surprisingly, there are only a few people that want to watch the foreign homeless man and the uneasy teenager fondle the fruit.Their shadow is a gangly early-twenties guy in a yellow uniform polo that shadows them around the store and there's an old lady in the bread aisle that wants John to pick a bagel brand for her (store brand is cheaper and tastes better with margarine!).   
  
Karkat demands a bag of mangoes to bring home, and since John can’t find it in himself to deny an alien the chance to expand their horizons, Karkat doesn’t have to wheedle very hard. He carries the bag around under his arm like a football or a baby and skulks behind John while he’s comparing prices on ramen. Monday isn’t really food shopping day, but the number of people in the apartment has doubled, and since noodles are so easy to expand on and cheap, he figures he should bring some home. He gets potatoes, too, the gross mac and cheese pods that Rose likes, a popsicle, a couple of boxes of spaghetti. They get in line. John doesn’t notice that Karkat acquired a package of hot dogs and a box of Hamburger Helper until he thinks he’s lost Karkat completely.  
  
“Okay, no, put those back,” John hisses immediately after peering over the aisles like a panicked parent. Karkat bares his teeth and very deliberately puts the mangoes, hot dogs, and fake meat onto the belt.   
  
“When you have a job you can buy me hot dogs,” John says sharply, but he’s laughing, and the weird kid from earlier watches John slack-jawed until he starts putting things on the belt.   
  
“You usin’ cash?”  
  
“Yeah.”  
  
“Uh,” the kid says, holding his hand out.   
  
“Can you put them in bags?”  
  
“Hey, look,” he says, scratching at his nose. “I ain’t get paid that much.”  
  
“You kind of suck at your job, man.”  
  
“Aw, what the fuck, don’t say that to my manager or nothing-"  
  
Karkat’s been shifting testily for the last minute and a half, making the same kind of low-throat rattle he does when he has to shower in cold water because Dave takes forever to wash his hair.   
  
“Are these toothmarks, dude, what the fuck,” the kid mutters, jamming the hot dogs into a bag. John gives Karkat a look. Karkat stares back.  You can’t chew on plastic, John mouths. Karkat mouths, what are you saying?   
  
The kid reaches out again, like John’s going to pay before everything’s rung up, but it’s too fast or something because Karkat snatches the kid’s wrist. They make eye contact. The kid wraps his other hand around Karkat’s before Karkat can let go, and Karkat loses it.  
  
“Let the fuck go!”  
  
When the trolls talk, John hears it almost in double-tone, like it’s English and Alternian layered. It’s not like he has to think to separate the sounds; it’s all instinctive. The rude-ass cashier doesn’t have the instinct. Karkat chitters obscenities, which is bad enough, but his sunglasses are hanging off one ear, and while dark red is a suspicious eye color, it’s got nothing on yellow sclera.  
  
“Oh my god, you’re on drugs,” the kid cries, and that’s apparently the cue for security to arrive right the fuck now.  
  
“Oh my god,” John says, “Oh my god.”  
  
“You keep your goddamn hands off me,” Karkat says to the officer who is doing the exact opposite of that. “I was not aware that coming to Earth meant I would be manhandled by some asshole with shit breath fresh from gnawing on his own excretions. I was, in fact, led astray by the brochures, which had clearly labeled boxes-don’t fucking touch me!-stating that I would not be sent to a fucking penitentiary for breathing in the wrong direction! Back the fuck up or I’m going for your throat!”  
  
Karkat looks more than a little wild-eyed at this point, windmilling his arm back to free his wrist (John thinks he might have seen something like that in a Don’t Get Kidnapped instructional video) and then immediately following that up with a brutal headbutt to the stomach and a stomp on the toes.   
  
“Karkat, you can’t just assault an officer, oh my god, oh my god, you just headbutted a fucking police officer, sir, I’m sorry, he’s foreign-”  
  
John ducks under the officer’s grasping hands, then gets clocked in the side of the head by Karkat and loses his temper entirely. He pulls up a round shell of air and bursts it out like a grenade, knocking everything in a ten-foot radius flat.  
  
“Oh, shit,” he says, reaching shakily for the popsicle and pressing it to where Karkat’s fist hit. “Shit, shit, shit, shit, what the shit.”  
  
“You’d better not be panicking,” Karkat mutters darkly from where he’s hunched up under the register. “You’ve already survived the end of the world and if you are panicking now I will strangle myself with second hand embarrassment. It will be strictly autonomous and that will make it even worse.”  
  
“Yeah, but I’ve never been to jail,” John points out. This, he thinks, is the important thing to keep in mind here. He’s done a lot of things, but he’s never been a criminal. “My dad’s gonna be pissed.”  
  
“Boys,” the officer says, wheezing as he gets to his feet. “I’m gonna ask you to sit tight while I call the police.”  
  
Despite the implication he is going to leave, the officer maintains unblinking eye contact with John while he’s on the phone. They’re then arrested-handcuffs and everything, it’s really an experience-and eventually frog marched into a cruiser. It’s a long ride to the station, long enough that John knows he’s going to be getting annoyed text messages from Dave any minute now.   
  
“I’m Officer Sylvan, boys. My men tell me one of you was accused of being on drugs in front of a security officer and you both became physically violent.”  
  
John sits on his hands. He’s pretty sure he’s gone completely red; he’s gone straight through nervous into irritated embarrassment. Karkat-well-Karkat pretty much claws into the desk, bares his fangs at Sylvan, and dares him to say anything.   
  
“Take your hat off in a station, son,” Sylvan demands. Karkat makes that low angry cat noise that always makes the hair on John’s neck stand up. Sylvan looks only a bit perturbed and gets up and rounds the desk, pinching the top of Karkat’s hat.  
  
“Fuck off!” Karkat spits, prying his claws out of the desk with obvious effort.  
  
The officer pulls Karkat’s hat off with an exasperated sigh. He stares at Karkat for a second, slack-jawed.  
  
“Son,” Sylvan says after a moment. “You got a condition.”  
  
“Oh my god,” John says, putting his head in his hands. Sylvan carefully puts the hat on his desk and heads for the door. Just as he gets his hand round the knob, Karkat snaps a World’s Best Dad mug into the back of his head and he goes down like a bag of bricks.  
  
“Oh shit.” John gets up, pokes Sylvan in the side with his sneaker. “Oh my fucking god you killed him.”  
  
Karkat blurts out an abrupt shriek that startles John shitless.   
  
“I want off your bullshit planet,” he spits. “I’m done with your language and your stacked hiveboxes and your slimy noodle pods and your fucking gravity-pinned lifestyle.”  
  
“What? Yeah, sure, only we kind of have to get out of here first,” John says, poking Sylvan again. “What if we get caught and someone wants to cut you open and make you into a battery or whatever?”  
  
“I’m not psionic, you festering blister,” Karkat says, momentarily distracted. “I don’t have the pan hardware to be a battery. Where’s my hat? The air currents on your planet are so fucked up and I don’t want to feel them anymore.”  
  
“It’s actually Dave’s hat.”  
  
Karkat puts it back on anyway.   
  
“Can we just...walk out?” John offers, perplexed.   
  
“I don’t understand the concept of ‘police’, so I’m not going to be much help here.”  
  
“Wait, no, not if he’s dead, shit.”  
  
Karkat hunches down, plants his hand on Sylvan’s neck.  
  
“He has a pulse. Can we just go?”  
  
“I guess-” John leans out the door, looks in both directions, “-okay, now, go.”  
  
Their frantic jog through the police station is the stuff of legends. They get lost no less than six times and are stopped a minimum of four times. Not once, however, does someone ask, “how the hell did a kid and a gray homeless man get in here?” John is forced to assume this is a normal occurrence in this station, judging by everyone’s complete apathy.   
  
“I guess it’s not like they can fingerprint you,” John says when they’re on the subway again. He’s not holding on to the loops, but he’s keeping his balance a lot better than Karkat. Karkat is gripping the loop with a desperation approaching fanatical and swaying like a drunk every time the speed changes. There’s only two other people on at this time of the day, but they’re on the far end of the car, and John’s taller enough than Karkat that he can kind of stand over him and hunch down.  
  
“I hate your planet,” Karkat informs John. He looks a little queasy.   
  
“Do you not have trains?”  
  
“There’s no ‘you’ anymore, dunderfuck, the entire population of Alternia is twelve.”  
  
“Oh, yeah, you guys still have to explain that.”  
  
“Tonight, remember? We were supposed to get snacks to tide us through the the heartburn your platonic pity will no doubt cause.”  
  
“I think your metaphors are slipping. Oh, fuck, now we don’t have any snacks.”  
  
“Can we go to another grocery store?”  
  
“You just want to look at the fruit again.”  
  
“No shit! Are humans typically renowned for their prescience, or are you just a kink in the genome?”  
  
“I’m not actually part of the rest of the human gene pool, remember? There’s us and then the babies and then the babies make us or whatever.”  
  
“Shut up and give me a piece of gum. Two pieces of gum.”  
  
“We can just order pizza,” John says, fishing gum out of his pocket and handing it over. “Have you ever had it?”  
  
“Doubtful, shitbulge.”  
  
“It’s the best human cuisine there is!” John says brightly, resting his chin between Karkat’s horns and counting himself lucky he doesn’t get headbutted in the dick. “Like we give it to visiting dignitaries and presidents and stuff, it’s gourmet.”  
  
Karkat’s probably eyeing him suspiciously, but John’s not moving to check.. Karkat stops every couple of steps to examine the escalator, and then he needs to feed a five into the ticket machine so he can get more dollar coins, and then the scratch cards behind a shop counter need to be looked at, and then John has to kick him in the ankles to get him moving. It’s not hard to get through the station with it so empty, though, and the apartment is only a half block away.   
  
“We don’t have any snacks and I think we’re banned from that particular store cos Karkat went fucking ballistic,” John announces as he closes the door behind them. Eridan’s dozing on the couch. Rose and Kanaya are tucked into the open space he leaves.   
  
“Pizza?” Rose wants to know. John loves her so much. She doesn’t even bother asking anymore.   
  
“Yeah. I thought we were going to die so I didn’t bother getting any guac or anything.”  
  
“Well, you can order then.”  
  
John groans, but obediently orders six large pizzas. They’ll be gone in two seconds flat. Karkat takes in calories like he’s using god tier shit every minute of every day.   
  
“Hey, why are you watching the news anyway?” he asks, shoving Eridan’s legs off the couch so he can sit down, even though Eridan immediately hunches up and kicks John in the ribs.   
  
“Cultural experiences,” Rose says simply, keying the volume down a bit. “Is that-”  
  
She pauses, her mouth faintly slack, and turns her head to look at John without taking her eyes off the screen.   
  
“Refresh my memory as to just what kind of trouble did Karkat cause at the grocery store, if you’d be so kind.”  
  
“I, uh, didn’t actually tell you,” John says, laughs a little awkwardly. Karkat, who’s been industriously stripping off his layers and scrubbing uncomfortably at the powder on his face, looks at Rose like a deer caught in the headlights, only a lot less vulnerable and lot more ‘oh shit’.   
  
“We got arrested,” John continues, rubbing his neck when Rose’s eyes narrow. Eridan kicks him again and gets an elbow to the head for it. “Mostly by accident...and knocked out a cop. That wasn’t really an accident. That was pretty intentional.”  
  
“Were you id’ed?” Rose demands, as much as she ever demands anything instead of delicately wheedling it out.  
  
“No.”  
  
“Look.”  
  
John looks. It’s security footage, surprisingly not very grainy, of Karkat up close and John in the far corner. There’s a clear view of Karkat’s face when he flips off the security officer on the way out.  
  
“Well, who’s going to believe some cop if he says he saw a kid with horns anyway?”  
  
Karkat sits down against the wall, reaching furtively for John’s laptop, even though John would have let him use it anyway.   
  
“Are you wearing Jade’s slipper things?” John wants to know, momentarily distracted from his worries of being arrested for treason or harboring a fugitive or something.  
  
“They’re moccasins,” Karkat says in the kind of voice that belongs behind a pulpit. He sounds like he’s having a religious conversion . “She said I needed to experience Earth human foot culture.”  
  
“I think she might have been messing with you.”   
  
“They’re incredibly comfortable, you fucking philistine.”  
  
“I have a proposal,” Rose says, pursing her mouth. “I will wait until we have our pizza and everyone is present, though I assure you it will not improve with the waiting.”  
  
As it turns out, Rose is entirely right! It absolutely does not improve with the waiting. Her brilliant proposal, with eight minds to pick and an entire internet of weird fiction with similar situations, boils down to no more than one sentence: “We pry this fucking thing open and let the pieces fall as they will.”  
  
Everyone goes fucking postal for like a minute and a half. John kind of squints a little, like he’s confused, but he gets it, that’s the easy thing and the right thing. They can’t keep the trolls cooped up like pets. He’s just stuck on the how.  
  
“How, exactly?” he asks after everyone shuts the hell up.   
  
“My mother,” Rose says, with a curious little tilt of her head. “She has gained considerable sway in the local media.”  
  
“It’s pretty weird,” Dave says, pursing his mouth. “Seen one middle-aged lady in fuck me boots sashay into a studio and not only demand full attention but receive it for like six monthson end, seen ‘em all. Got a little science corner for herself where she can talk about bugs and radiation and rainbows or whatever the fuck.”  
  
“Why do I care if your mom was wearing fuck me boots?”  
  
“It’s atmospheric.”  
  
  
“Time’s a-wasting,” Jade says cheerfully at four am the next day, half an hour before DAP starts filming for their early morning show. John’s only just dozed off, and being woken up to a cold black morning when he was just comfortably tucked into the afghan and Karkat’s hair is a rude shock. Dave sits up, a pale smudge against the dark, and flicks on the lights without a single word of warning.  
  
“Wake the fuck up,” he says, yawning coffee breath straight into John’s face. It’s gross. Everyone cranks into motion in the desultory way of sleepy teenagers and they’re on the first train into the city at quarter of five. Kanaya takes naturally to the subway, curling her hand into the loop and keeping her balance apparently without effort. Eridan sits on the ground, which is disgusting, and Karkat sways back and forth with his head against the window, which is only slightly less disgusting. Karkat fidgets angrily with the edge of the hat that he won’t give back to Dave.  
  
Rose calls Mrs Lalonde from the back door, and she lets them in without a word, although she gives the troll squinty-eyed once overs. She leads them down a couple of hallways until they end up in a decently sized office and closes the door behind them.  
  
“Well,” she says, a faint hiccuping in her voice. “Morning! Whatta we got here?”  
  
“You’re the floating sleeping lady,” Karkat says, one of his eyes closing. He looks like he’s about to keel over asleep. “From like. Sburb. Space. Sleeping in a dream.”  
  
“Astute observation,” Mrs Lalonde says with a wide smile. It’s not a five a.m. smile. “Asstute obuttservation.”  
  
“Observasstion,” John offers. Mrs Lalonde nods at him approvingly.  
  
Mrs Lalonde is really friendly, even at ass o clock in the morning when everyone but Dave and Jade are yawning their heads off. Rose sets her other coffee on her mother’s desk. Without either of them acknowledging it, Mrs Lalonde picks up the coffee and takes a long sip. Her hands look like Dave’s, but with long pink fingernails. She has the same wide knuckles and square palms.   
  
“Aliens?” she asks. Rose nods. Mrs Lalonde nods again, pursing her lips.  
  
“Granted, I remember you from, like, a completely different version of myself through hard reset interference, but whatevs, shit’s secondary! You’re looking for some expose shit, aren’t you?”  
  
John’s pretty sure that Mrs Lalonde didn’t talk like this when he was thirteen, but after Sburb when they got smushed with the other versions of themselves (poor tiny teenage grandma) she started sounding a lot more like Roxy. She sounds like Roxy smashed into a tired thirty something woman with an emotionally exhausting nineteen year old daughter, mostly.    
  
“Yes, of course.”  
  
“Right. I think we can make that happen.”  
  
It starts like this: Mrs Lalonde stands with her lips pursed and a half drunk girl scout cookie iced coffee in one hand. Behind her is a row of folding chairs filched from the staff room. On each of these chairs is Kanaya, Karkat, Eridan, and Tavros, with the addition of Rose perched precariously on Kanaya’s lap. John lurks awkwardly behind the chairs, trying not to draw attention from the trolls but too excited by the prospect of being on tv to stand still. Dave is beside his mother, having demanded that his “fine elfin feature like a fuckin tolkien novel deserve to be with the woman that spawned them like some kind of hellish mengelian fractal that hopefully unsettles everyone watching”. John thinks it’s a bullshit way of saying he wants his mother’s emotional support, because Dave is a mother’s boy clear through even though he had nothing to do with her until his late teens. Jade isn’t even in camera view, considering it her place to harangue the two camera guys until they explain every single piece of equipment to her.  
  
When Karkat gets to his feet and comes forward, Mrs Lalonde gestures to Jade, who hits a key on the computer and runs Mrs Lalonde’s script, the one that cuts into the feeds for all the big name national news channels and tells them it has access. The feeds accept the script’s credentials and they’re in, broadcasting live from a dinky DAP studio clear across the country, if not most of the world. The American public sees a grainy feed of a bunch of teenagers; most of them shut it off or complain loudly on the phone, but enough keep watching, and when the teenagers start talking about extinction events and getting shot out of the sky, they listen.  
  
A tiny grey kid with rust colored eyes and a phenomenally haunted look on his face talks for nearly an hour about a childhood filled with weapons and dreaming of dead gods; sleeping in tanks full of soporific drugs to calm their natural aggression so they can focus on preparing for an adult life spent entirely in space; the millennia of complete military dominance that crumpled under the weight of a dead empress, famine, and venereal disease; a panicked flight three hundred million miles across the black that landed them at the feet of four human teenagers they’d been unknowingly chatting with for years. He’s absolutely riveting, magnetically charismatic and furiously charming.  
  
Kanaya begins to speak as the housewives are putting on their morning talk shows and still no one has cut the feed. The housewives see something of themselves in Kanaya, in the small neat hands worn down with thankless work. She picks uncomfortably at the neck of her hoodie while discussing casual cannibalism and the hemocaste system. She presses her ankle against Rose’s as she presents dreambubbles as a facet of troll culture and chats about the dried blood smell of the Mother Grub.  It was a unanimous decision not to let Eridan talk, and Tavros had absolutely no interest in the idea: he spends the entire time mulling over a cup of hot chocolate. Eridan alternately sulks and kicks Karkat in the back of the leg.   
  
Afterwards, everyone sits in the dim glow from the camera and watches each other. John feels kind of wiped out, like he’s run a five kay or something. The phone rings. Mrs Lalonde picks it up without taking her eyes off Rose. She mumbles a few things, glancing towards the receiver in her hand suspiciously, and sets it back down carefully.  
  
“That was an Agent Feodorov from the United States Central Intelligence Agency,” she says with an abrupt little-girl nervous laugh. “Holy shit, straight to the top.”  
  
“Started from the bottom, now we here,” Dave mutters to himself.   
  
“He said they’re sending some people out to get us or something. Apparently this is a very convincing prank that several hundred thousand people reported and they’re frigging going to investigate to give the public peace,” Mrs Lalonde reports, baring her teeth in a humorless grin. It’s a very trollish expression.   
  
“If it serves our purpose, they can investigate as they like,” Rose says.   
  
The trucks are there impressively fast. Feodorov sets up a perimeter and sets his men to investigating while he hunts down Mrs Lalonde and everyone. They’re still allowed free reign of the area inside the perimeter until Feodorov decides the time has arrived to head out. All in all it’s a pretty nice way to be accused of criminal mischief and unauthorized use of federal air times. Everyone spreads out, which is also really nice, since they’ve been packed as close as sardines the last couple of weeks. John spends most of the next eight minutes scarfing down crackers from a friendly woman on the perimeter.  
  
Before they leave, John goes down to the parking lot behind the building to get Karkat. It’s sort of a security risk, he guesses, but at this point, with their cover blown so badly, it didn’t seem worth it to pick a fight over ten minutes outside. He stops at the sound of voices, whips around behind one of the concrete supports so hard he cracks his head off it, and stifles a whimper of pain. It’s probably overkill, but he wants to listen to whoever Karkat’s talking to, and the trolls have freakishly good night vision. At least this way he isn’t visible. He peeks round the edge-it’s just Karkat and Eridan, who looks like a lot more of a douchebag with his cape on, but it’s balled up at his feet.   
  
“Don’t be retarded, we learnt better than that,” Karkat says, with a brittle hardness to the slant of his shoulders and neck. “We can’t run. Do you get that? There’s nowhere to go.”  
  
Eridan tilts his head back, looking up at the rectangle of visible sky beyond the far edge of the garage. The line of his fins and horns are thrown into stark relief by the lone fluorescent light. John leans out a little farther.  
  
“Gotta say, Kar, as a point a conscience it don’t feel all that great to be resentful,” Eridan says at last. “We do so much as we can, fuck if that ain’t the truth, and it ain’t anyone’s fault.”  
  
“I know, fuck, I know.”  
  
Eridan reaches out and grips Karkat’s hand and John’s tongue crawls down his throat to strangle his windpipe.   
  
“End’s approachin’ one way or another,” Eridan says darkly. “Fuckin’ pain in the ass fuckin’ runaway empress.”  
  
“Don’t fool yourself,” Karkat says. He sounds hollow, all washed empty like an eggshell under a faucet. “This isn’t anywhere near over, you cretinous bitch. Knowing where Feferi is is only the start. And frankly I’m already so completely fucking done with this planet that I might as well roll into the grave headfirst and have it done with. I’d headbutt the universe to get a fucking waterbeetle.”  
  
“A proper recupe’,” Eridan says mournfully.  
  
“My lusus.”  
  
“A weapon,” Karkat says on a long sigh. “No one telling me I can’t use a blade without hurting myself like I’m even more small and stupid than I am now.”  
  
“Bioluminescent oceans.”  
  
“Fucking torchlight yaoi festivals.”  
  
Eridan snorts, loud and inelegant. John really wants to know what that’s about.   
  
“Hey, uh,” he says gracelessly loud, stepping out from the pillar. Eridan jerks upright. Karkat punches him in the arm. “Feodorov shouted a bunch of shit at the top of his lungs and I guess we’re heading out. He says there’s blankets in the back of the van, probably.”  
  
“That’s really the pressing point here,” Karkat says as they start towards the front. “The location of the nearest blankets. Presumably to fucking strangle ourselves if things go south.”  
  
Mrs Lalonde is shunted into a different van, and they’re all taken into separate rooms as soon as they arrive. Tavros starts getting nervous as soon as he’s separated, and gets more nervous as the minutes pass. He rattles his fingers off his legs, which are getting a little rust in the joint bits and he wants to figure out how to fix it, but he’s never had much anything to do with mechanics. A guy in a lab coat comes in after a bit, but doesn’t say anything. He just stares at Tavros and makes him even more uncomfortable. He thinks this is what Rose calls a ‘doctor’.  
  
The doctor hasn’t stopped tapping on his clipboard in almost ten minutes, which Tavros knows because he’s been keeping track of the seconds. Rose said it’d help him get adjusted to Earth time. It doesn’t seem like it’s doing much of anything, though, because sunrise caught him outside without shades, and while Earth’s daytime weather is absolutely gorgeous, the sunlight can still blind him for an hour at a time. The doctor tilts his head, probably taking in Tavros’ horn span. He hopes the doctor is suitably impressed. His rack is the only thing he has going for him.  
  
“What are your dietary requirements?” the doctor says at last, sounding somewhere between weary and horrified amusement.  
  
“I dunno.”  
  
“Can you point out your major organs for me?”  
  
“No. I guess, um, my bloodpusher is here,” he says and points to his chest. The doctor dutifully marks this down.  
  
“Are you a mammal?”  
  
“I dunno.”  
  
“Are your people insect-based?”  
  
“I don’t know.”  
  
“Do you know anything about your body or how it works?”  
  
“No.”  
  
“No anatomy classes?”  
  
“Those modules cost more than I got a year.”  
  
“Have you ever seen a doctor before?”  
  
“What’s that?”  
  
“Really?”  
  
“Well, I can’t tell you if I don’t know what it is. Ignorance was not a, uh, thing that stopped being part of my education, or lack thereof.”  
  
“A medical professional.”  
  
“Oh. Medicalancer? Those are only for the Fleet. Not for kids on the homeworld. We suck it up, mostly.”  
  
“Have you ever been ill?”  
  
“Don’t think so.”  
  
“Injuries?”  
  
“Well...” Tavros trails off, pulling one leg up on the cot to roll up his pant leg. The denim is still stiff with seawater. “I kind of got cut in half a while ago and one of our friends, no, he’s isn’t really my friend, he’s kind of weird, but one of...no, he really wasn’t anyone’s friend except Nepeta, was he? The moirail of someone I FLARPed with made me prosthetics, and they work really well, but I think I’m supposed to be taller, going by, uh, my shoulder width.”  
  
“You do have a longer torso than would be expected.” The doctor pauses. “Did you say you were cut in half?”  
  
“Ah, yeah, mostly.” Tavros stands and fidgets nervously for a moment before pressing the flat of his palm to where his leg becomes metal. “Right about here. I’m not, uh, gonna take my pants off, that’s too weird.”  
  
“It’s not all that strange, you know.”  
  
“Are you, uh, hitting on me?”  
  
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” the doctor says, flinging the door open and shouting down the hall. “Ellie! Can we get someone in here who knows what they’re talking about?”  
  
“Why? Thought you were Dr Hotshot, the way you been talking!”  
  
“Ellie, don’t be a bitch. He thinks I’m hitting on him!”  
  
Ellie laughs loud enough that Tavros can hear it. She laughs for almost a minute and a half before she comes in, patting Tavros companionably on the shoulder. It’s a little weird, but it feels nice, and Ellie has a round friendly face.   
  
“Do you know anything about your insides at all, baby?”  
  
“No,” Tavros says miserably. “I’m sorry.”  
  
“Don’t worry, baby. We’ll do some x-rays and things. Don’t be scared.”  
  
“At the very least human level cognition, if somewhat lacking in education,” the doctor lists off, when Tavros is finally brought into a conference room sort of place with all of his friends already there. “Human anatomy excepting for genitalia and minor variances in muscle entry points. We can’t give you anything definitive, obviously, but they do seem very similar to us.”  
  
A senator- her nametag says Senator Gaye (D)- joins the doctor beside a white board covered in scrawly anatomy drawings, a few dry erase markers in her hands. Rose gets to her feet and glides over to the senator, carefully taking a marker. She holds the marker, pursing her mouth, and draws a right triangle. She marks the sides with neat little lines-one, two, three-and then a few inches below writes the numbers from one to ten with a corresponding number of dots.   
  
“Mathematics are a universal constant,” she says. “I don’t know much beyond basic geometry, but this should allow you some mutual understanding. We are not so different, you know. You don’t need thorough medical exams for that.”  
  
She says it with more than a little smugness, a little sting of ‘I can talk to the aliens and you can’t’. Eridan snatches the marker, pauses to give Rose a brief look that’s both apologetic and antagonistic at once, and draws the exact same triangle, tallies, and numbers.   
  
“Do we really gotta go through this hoofbeastshit again?” he demands. Karkat makes that low angry clattering noise. The senator and the doctor look at each other. Tavros shifts nervously, having at no point become any less uncomfortable here, and decides not to say anything about being able to talk to the doctor.   
  
“The _point_ ,” Rose says, “Is that the rest of their people are coming here with tactical ordinance you cannot even imagine and you have us here dithering around with our hands in our pants. I demand you take us to the president himself; really, the two of you haven’t got half the authority we’re going to need.”  
  
John ends the longest day of his life sitting on the carpet of the president’s office.


	4. arc 2 act 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> writing this chapter made me want to die ugh but here its done

“I would rather see this planet destroyed than fallen into alien hands,” the president says earnestly. Everything he says is either earnest or solemn, and often both at once. “Every president since JFK has had the capability to make that happen. I would rather not be the one remembered for actually doing it-but if the choice must be made-”

“It totally doesn’t need to be,” John says, blanching. “It really doesn’t. We don’t need to bring nukes into this at all! We just want to find our friends and help them.”

“How did the group of you even meet?”

“Oh, you know, we played a game together,” John says with a hyena laugh that he immediately cuts off. He sounds hysterical. “Kid stuff.”

John shoots Rose a squinty look. He’s been wondering for almost an hour now why she had to bring nuclear weapons into the discussion at all-well, he knows they needed to reassure people and this is one way to do it, but Rose is playing one _long_ fucking game here and he’s worried the pawns are too big for her. Rose is brilliant and clever but not at all inclined to explain herself ahead of time and he doesn’t want to mess something up, but he also doesn’t want the president hover-handing the big red button.

“Your friends,” the president says patiently. “Alright. Yes. I’m going to have you all wait here, if you don’t mind.”

The president gets to his feet and goes out of the room. John digs his palms into his face and groans. The president’s a busy man and John feels awful for using his time to complain about trying to find people he’s not even sure he likes, but it is kind of a matter of national security. He believed Karkat’s story about everyone dying, but he hasn’t got any proof, and there’s always a chance that Karkat was lying or wrong or- fuck, fuck. John sits up. There’s always a chance Karkat is a vanguard of an invasion force, and if that’s true, then John’s just given him access to the president, shit, all of the shits. Karkat sits awkwardly on the edge of his folding chair. His pupils are tiny pricks in the light, and there’s a bizarre, thin bright red line around the edge of his left iris.

“Karkat,” John hisses, inching to the side. “You’re not here to kill us all, right?”

Karkat squints at him. His eyes are bloodshot close up.

“Of fucking course not,” he hisses back. “We played the fucking game together, there would be no point.”

“What’s that have to do with anything?”

“We’re the only ones who remember,” Karkat whispers with obvious reluctance.

“What the hell do you mean?”

“It’s like it never fucking even happened if no one remembers,” Karkat whispers viciously. “Too easy to dismiss it as some kind of fucking delusional fever dream from the slow poisons of my subordinates for gross incompetence and negligence.”

“You don’t have any subordinates.”

“I was about to be promoted when everyone died,” he says. He sounds understandably put out about it.

“Sorry everyone died before you got a raise.”

“What the hell is a raise?”

“You get paid more money,” John says as the president returns, trailed by more of the ubiquitous frightening adults in well fitted suits. There were already six of them scattered around the room, almost fading into the walls the way their guns fade into their clothing, but as POTUS comes in their stances change to rigidity and John starts to feel like an amoeba under a microscope. He’s never really thought about how tall people can be intimidating, being tall himself and only dwarfed by Dave, who hunches like a foot and a half downwards. The Secret Service is worthy of trust and confidence, which evidently requires that even the women are nine feet tall and capable of hiding fifteen pistols in their buns. John shrinks down into himself a little bit and feels like Dave looks most of the time.

It feels, very briefly, exciting and interesting to be near the president, but they’ve all seen him on the tv for hundreds of hours over the last few years and the novelty rapidly becomes routine. Here is a man in power; here are teenagers; there are the teenagers unimpressed by the man in power. He has a careful, casual intimacy in person, although his media charisma isn’t any more charming outside of media. John’s of a split mind. On one hand, this is a very cool experience and the president seems like a genuinely nice guy. On the other, there are eight violent aliens loose on a planet that goes into a frenzy when humans look a little different.

There are a few minutes of aimless discussion between the president and his people. John and his people look uncomfortably at each other and around the room. John folds one of his legs and sits on his foot, wishing for his coffee back. It was confiscated outside the meeting room, in case it was a glycerin bomb or ricin or something. It would be nice to have something to do with his hands.

“You must be kidding me,” Kanaya says eventually, with a tactlessness even John can appreciate. The closer Secret Service woman gives her a withering look. Karkat makes an incredulous noise.

“Aliens,” he says. “There are actual fucking aliens here on your doorstep and you’re fucking ignoring this blighted cultural expansion for your godawful planet so you can talk about your _stupid fucking economy_. Do you not understand that there are things of a magnitude of importance that you physically cannot grasp them with your shrunken pans? Do humans as a species undergo surgery as grubs to remove your reasoning glands?”

“I’m going to ask you to be quiet, sir.”

“Hark at her!” Karkat barks. “You can’t understand a word I’m saying!”

“I can, as a matter of fact.”

“What the shit,” Karkat says. “Seriously, what the shit. You can nominally understand and yet you are not fucking cogitating, you are not fucking listening by the slightest definition. Are you incapable of grasping implications? You have gripping apparatuses; I have been told you are an evolved, sapient species. That is such horseshit! I am frankly surprised your ancestors ever fucking made it down out of the trees and didn’t break their necks on the way down. Our fleet would have decimated your entire planet in about six minutes. Do you fucking understand? You are clearly not alone in the universe, congratulations, I am truly excited for the fucking parties. You continue to not be alone. You continue to fail at simple cause and effect!”

“What is he talking about? Get to the point, now.”

“The Alternian Empire,” Karkat says with great satisfaction. This doesn’t have the effect he’s wanting. “I looked up the fucking definition, alright, even in your stupid bullshit language-what the fuck is an apple-an empire is a number of territories ruled by one person, wow, now I’m even teaching you your own words.”

“So there are more of you.”

“Yes, there are more of us, I just fucking _said_ that, but they’re not trolls, they’re all kinds of different things, and with the empire gone they’re free to do as they please. Do you understand now? Your planet is host to the twelve remaining remnants of the Alternian Empire and all of our client races have access to our weapons and our ships and if a fuckup like me could trace the Empress’ trail here then _so can they_.”

“Are you threatening us with revenge?”

Karkat shrieks in frustration.

“He’s saying that all of these other aliens are going to come here to kill them because they killed them first,” John says. He gets a couple of dirty looks. “Well, you know, it’s true. It’s what he said.”

“I thought that the Alternian fleet was coming here,” the president says.

Rose gets to her feet, sending Secret Service to shift towards her.

“It was not a lie,” she says. “Do you know anything about Rome, Mr. President? All of the peoples they conquered were expected to adopt the Roman identity. This is very much like that. The Alternian fleet is coming here. You’d know they were all dead if you’d watched any of the television this morning, but I imagine you are a very busy man.”

“You could say that.” The president pauses, linking his fingers together and gesturing to a woman who goes outside and returns with donuts after a few minutes. “Where do we go from here?”

“We need to find the Empress first,” Kanaya says. “The empire is not dust on the solar wind so long as she is alive. It may be enough to end this war before it starts, though I doubt it.”

Eridan rests his chin on his hand, scowling.

“She’s gotta be somewhere around,” he says sullenly. “You only got the one planet. You don’t stand a aluminum ball’s chance in deep ocean. You don’t even got as anyone would call defenses. Nuclear? That’s _so_ two thousand years ago.”

“We have scientists.”

"Yeah, scientists are so smart,” Eridan says, snorting so hard that he might give himself cerebral damage. “Three millenia and they ain’t got any closer to figurin’ out if the light in the refrigerator goes on or off when you shut the door."

“It turns off,” Jade says.

“Score one for the protectorate of Earth.”

“We are not one of your territories,” the president cuts in. “We will accept any help you can give, but Earth is not part of your empire.”

He sounds understandably dubious. Earth’s only help right now is a group of teenagers. The Empress is a teenager. Her people are teenagers. It makes sense. John’s still annoyed by it. Doesn’t the president know they’ve already saved the world once? But of course he doesn’t. They’re all doomed to a lifetime of underestimation because no one else knows about the Game.

It’s coming on to eleven o clock at night and no one’s eaten since well before the previous midnight. Even with their month and a half on Earth, the trolls are still struggling with diurnal lifestyles, and they’re all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed despite the hour. Karkat’s got big bruisy marks under his eyes like he did in the Game. It’s always got the ring of capitals, it always has a heavy sting and a burn to the word like putting a hand flat on a hot skillet. Some things don’t ever go away, no matter how long you wait. John’s always thinking about the Game somehow, connecting it and remembering and even when he thinks about the future, wonders these days if he’s going to sit up in a bed in a city and call Rose and ask if it all ever really happened. It would be so easy to pretend it didn’t. When you die, you don’t come back, regardless of if it was the right death or the wrong death.

And yet there are gargoyle aliens sitting in the White House, chittering quietly to friends from a lifetime and a universe away. Maybe it wouldn’t be so easy to pretend the Game didn’t happen. John supposes things can only realistically be ignored when they don’t have repercussions.

“I fail to see the problem,” Kanaya says, tilting her face down. The Secret Service do not look happy that the movement brings her horns down at a goring angle. “Your children are expected to listen to the advice of their elders, if I am not mistaken. You have not even learned that there are others in the universe. You had to be told.You could learn much if you’d be quiet and obedient.”

“It ain’t like we’re tryin to fit ourselves into your stupid backwards planet,” Eridan says, blatantly playing up the mocking arrogance always present in his voice. “Rather give it a nuclear bombardment til you’re back in your disgusting gene ooze than try to make jam a square peg into a round hole.”

“Most humans don’t come from ectoslime,” Jade hisses.

“Shut up,” Eridan hisses back. “Fuckin lousy no good goddamn perverse human relations.” Louder, he says, “Like we ain’t about makin a life here. We just can’t go home until we got Fef back, as a fuckin’ point of importance.”

“If you’re trying to identify yourselves as a threat,” the president says, trailing off.

“Don’t be ridiculous. Threat ain’t even a word for the sheer damage we could do.”

John notices that no one is mentioning that the trolls’ ship is unarmed and sunk at the bottom of the bay. Probably they want everyone to assume they’re all highly weaponized at any given moment. The Secret Service doesn’t look happy. They’re not happy about the whole hijacking-federal-airtime thing, either. John doesn’t care. He doesn’t exist to make presidential security happy.

It takes a disgustingly long time, long enough that John’s mouth goes dry and he dozes off ten times only to jerk awake when Rose kicks him in the ankle, to decide that no one is going to have charges pressed against them-for now, anyway. John slumps his head forward into his palm, staring blearily at the president.

“So we’re not going to jail this time either,” he says with an enormous yawn. He gets a couple of mildly confused looks. Rose kicks him again.

“That protectorate thing,” Eridan says, circling back to the point the way he has three times now, with the sleepy tenacity of a rabid dog just after being hit with a tranquilizer dart. “If you ain’t one of us, why we got to help you? We can snatch Fef and go, we don’t got to stick around and offer any help with the client races. This is some basic shit.”

“If you help us, we help you,” Jade says. “That’s a pretty basic thing, too.’

“For sake a argument,” Eridan says wearily. Jade boots him hard in the shin.

“We have nuclear weapons,” the president says. “We have rail guns and things I won’t explain for you, in case this goes sideways. I’m sure you understand. If you won’t help us with your client races while we help you find your Empress, then I’m afraid we’ll simply have to remove the problem at the root.”

“Good going,” Karkat spits, punching Eridan in the side of the head. “If you’re going to play it like that, human, alright, let’s dance. Your nukes won’t do shit on even a weak-ass scout ship. Your best pilots are maggots being swung around in a sock, compared to even a half-decent helmsman. Are you getting the size of the thing here? If you want to keep wasting time with this dumb fucking pissing contest, go ahead, but full disclosure, while you’re doing that, I’m going to be saving both of our fucking races.”

Karkat jumps to his feet. It would be impressive if when he sat, his toes hadn’t dangled an inch off the floor.

“I’m fucking outie,” he says, storming out. John groans and puts his head in hands.

The president gets to his feet with a pilot cough, his security falling into neat ranks.

“Excuse me; there are other countries that ought to be kept abreast of the situation.”

They’re politely escorted out of the White House. John kind of expects a firing squad to mow them down at any moment, but no one even gives them sideways glances.

“They don’t believe us,” Rose says when they’re out on the street. “No one believes something will happen until it does.”

“Shit,” Jade says, which is really about the shape of the situation. “I could have called that, like, ten hours ago, but I was really hoping people would get less stupid after we rebooted the goddamn universe! Like maybe they’d pick up some sense or something, goddamn.”

“Aliens in the White House,” Dave says, squinting behind his shades even though it’s dark out. “There was a literal illegal alien invasion of the White House and no one did anything about it. No FBI arrest or anything. Little too peaceful in there. Little too My Little Pony than Rambo.”  
  
“There’s no way they’re going to just let us go free,” John says, which gets him a mildly surprised look, but he isn’t incapable of being perceptive. He’s a pretty smart guy, after all. “There’s literally no way! It doesn’t make any sense.”

“Think we’re getting tracked to get to Fef?” Eridan asks grimly.

“For a species of fucking idiots, you have some underhanded goddamn ideas,” Karkat says. “What is your government going to do with an Empress, though?”

“Anything they want,” Rose says. She sounds tranquil, but her face is furious. “If you aren’t a citizen and there is no proof you exist, they can do anything they want. I don’t want to say vivisection and reverse-engineering all of your tech, but it’s probably going to end in vivisection and reverse-engineering all of your tech. We’ve got four billion years of evolution behind us and we’ve been at some form of war nearly all of that time. It’s going to be weapons and ships.”

“An empire,” Jade offers. “Duh. Right. Oh, shit. I want to think better of my country than that, but, uh, I really can’t!”

“Already showed we’ll come this far for her,” Eridan says. “Pretty clearly do anything for her, at this point. Fuck, Fef. It’s not like she can’t handle herself, but she ain’t a goddamn one woman army.”

“What do we do?” John asks. “Like where do we even start with this?”

“We’re going to crack it open,” Rose says. “Again. But it’ll work this time, because it has to.”

**Author's Note:**

> Three arcs in nine acts exploring: troll/human relations, the human assumption that the human way is better, aliens (!!!), safety vs curiosity, humans suddenly becoming part of a galactic community, "if it's not in the bible it isn't true" as applied to aliens, how long a secret can be kept and what lengths a person will go to to keep it, existential angst of a doomed race, the nature of sapience, the value of one race over another, what defines a monster, the nature of living, is there a place on earth for aliens, human adaptability applied to troll philosophy, the common ground between cultures, how does a spacefaring race cope confined to one planet and vice versa, etc, etc ETCETERA because this is how I get my kicks, ok.


End file.
